The Best Christmas Gift & the Miracle We Need

And the Farmer, he’s driving down the middle of an empty country road, when he just flicks the headlights right off and the black isn’t black after all.

“Look at it!” I whisper it.

The bowl of milky moon’s spilling over snow sleeping fields.

“You could drive the whole way home without the lights on.”

“That moon sure is bright… ”

The Farmer’s leaning over the steering wheel.

The moon reflects the sun, and the Christmas-white fields reflect the moon, and we’re all faces shining tonight, the whole world looking up.

Wise men did this — two thousand years ago, far in the east, magi were like this, craning necks back to touch the black — to read star Braille in the dark.

Wise men, men of the ruling body of the Megistanes, robed sages with absolute power in choosing the king of the eastern empire. The wise men, the king-makers. King-Makers feeling along the stars for a sign.

They say that’s 10 times as many stars as the grains of sand on all the world’s shores and deserts.

But there’s no seeing it from these fields —- that 8000 light years into that celestial ocean, the whirl of a stellar wind forms the waving threads of the Hourglass Nebula.

There’s no seeing it with the naked eye, the Sombrero Galaxy’s blinding white, its bulbous centre spinning like an explosive broad-rimmed hat, whipping up a dust ring 28 million light years above these December fields.

There’s no glancing up to a mere 7,000 light years away, to the filmy wings of the 90 trillion kilometers high Eagle Nebula and how it’s bearing right tonight newborn stars in this explosive nursery.

It’s up there on Christmas Eve, whether you canread along the stellar dots raised in the night or not:

“He breathed the word, and all the stars were born” (Ps.33:6 NLT).

Our God breathes stars.

Is that the wisp of His breath rising right there in the Eagle Nebula?

Sitting here beside The Farmer, the swine herder, I’m thinking of sheep herders who saw God breathe a Star of Wonder over a Bethlehem sky.

I’m thinking of the whole bright sky declaring the glory of God, pouring forth speech: “Glory to God in the highest, And on earth, peace among men with whom He is pleased” (Lk. 2:14).

I’m thinking that we’re all on cusp of Christmas, looking up, hearing, seeing, nearly touching the glory of God, and it all begs the whisper of a question: who are we that He is mindful of us?

Who are we that the Maker of man might descend a man, that the Bread of Life might hunger for us, that the Fountain of Living Waters might thirst for our quenching?

Who are we that The Way might make the journey for us, that the Life might lay down and die so we could live?

That is who we are: the entire planet is an infinitesimal 0.12 pixel in the photographed scheme of space.

It almost looks like nothing, this globe with its craning wise men.

Pale Blue dot is Earth, in a shaft of sun light, taken from 4 billion miles away

So we float, captured in a ray of light, suspended in the lonely black of space.

That is who we are on Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Eve, the whole of the world sleeps and rises and waits and worships and we are a pinpoint.

We are a pinpoint and the astronomer Carl Sagan, deeply moved by that photograph of who we are in this universe, he said,

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
~Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan, he looked at that pale blue dot in all that dark…. and that’s what one of our wise men decreed — that there’s “no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

No hint of help?

No sign of saving?

No rumor of relief?

What if our God didn’t bother with a mere “hint”? What if our God rang it across the heavens, broadcast it from the astral apex, shattered the skies with the tidings?

Our God who breathes stars, He breathed Bethlehem’s Star, then took on lungs and breathed in stable air.

Our God who formed and delivered the heavens, He waited patient like an embryo in a womb and delivered Himselfto free all humanity.

Our God who cradles whole galaxies in the palm of His hand, whom highest heavens cannot contain, He folds Himself into our skin and He curls His newborn fist in the cradle of a barn feed trough — and we are saved from ourselves.

We are saved from our hopelessness — because God came with infant fists and opened wide His hand to take the nail sharp edge of our sins.

We are saved from our pain — because God pierced the dark and came to the pinpoint of us in the universe and He took the nails.

We are saved from our loneliness — because God is love that can’t stand to leave us by ourselves, to ourselves.

The entire cosmos sings it on Christmas Eve: We are not alone.

We are a pinpoint in the universe that is now nailed to eternity because of the wood of a manger, of a Tree, of a crowning wreath of thorns.

Out of the dark, out of the black and right into the the land of the shadow of death, a great Light has dawned, and God comes and God is with us, Emmanuel… God on the pale blue dot.